By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

The French Presidential Election and the Long War on Fake News

The
recently concluded French presidential election has seen one of the latest
iterations of the long struggle against fake news. Fake news refers to stories
which purport to be accounts of true events but which in fact are not. While
the intent of some fake news publications is to provide satirical humor, other
fake news publications seek to use the spread of their seemingly-true
falsehoods to influence the decisions of their gulled readers. As this essay
will show, the struggle against fake news has a long history which can be
traced back to classical antiquity.

Fake
news was a prominent problem in the recent French presidential election
campaign. In the days before the first round of the election, researchers from
Oxford University found that fake news comprised up to “one-quarter of the political links shared on Twitter in
France.” During the campaign for the second round of the election, presidential
candidate Emmanuel Macron had to file a complaint with the police “against
unknown persons for spreading false information and attempting to manipulate
the election” after his challenger, far-right leader Marine Le Pen, brought up slanderous fake news during
their televised election debate, falsely accusing him of having opened an
offshore bank account in the Cayman Islands “for purposes of tax evasion.”

Two
days before the second round of the election, hackers released 9 gigabytes of leaked emails from
Macron’s presidential campaign, and campaign officials warned that “authentic
documents had been mixed on social media with fake ones to sow ‘doubt and
misinformation.’” To minimize the influence of the leak on voters, the French
government quickly banned reporting on the contents of the leaked material,
warning “news outlets in France that journalists could face criminal charges
for publishing or republishing the material.” Due to these efforts, French
voters were not swayed by the leak and gave Macron a resounding victory. Donald Tusk, the
President of the European Council, declared that French voters had “said no to
the tyranny of fake news.”

Before
the election, to prevent its platform from being used for the propagation of fake news to
sway French voters, Facebook preemptively cancelled “30,000 fake accounts in
France.” Facebook is also currently in the process of identifying and cancelling
accounts which “send out ‘fake news’ stories.” However, a separate problem exists
of “fake and automated” Facebook accounts which could be mobilized for
malicious intent. Even after Facebook had deleted 6 million fake accounts in
April, Gannett, a major newspaper publisher, discovered that “the influx of
fake accounts” had not stopped, and that the Facebook page of USA Today, one of its properties, was
gaining “approximately 1,000 phony likes per day.” Gannett has since invited the FBI to
investigate. As we shall shortly see, the problem of fake accounts on Facebook
has a troubling parallel on the Twitter platform.

Facebook
has also created a new position, head of news
products, which includes in its portfolio the responsibility of
finding ways to “stop the proliferation of false news on the service.”
Alexandra Hardiman, who was formerly with the New York Times, has been appointed to this position. Hardiman’s
challenge is especially urgent given that Facebook itself has “confirmed that
‘malicious actors’ tried to game its algorithm” during last year’s US general election
to “negatively influence the public perception of one of the candidates
(presumed to be Hillary Clinton).”

The
fake news problem on Twitter is more serious given the lack of an adequate
response from its management. A recent study from
the University of Southern California and Indiana University has indicated that
up to 48 million Twitter accounts “are in fact bots rather than people.”
Indeed, this number is a “conservative estimate” since “complex bots could have
shown up as humans in their model.” While some bots “perform useful functions,
such as dissemination of news and publications,” a growing number have
“malicious applications,” including the “manufacture” of “fake grassroots
political support.” The problem with these Twitter bots is not
insignificant, as was demonstrated during the run-up to the second round of the
French presidential election, when a bot army was activated to promote the
spread of the leaked Macron campaign emails. While Twitter has announced plans
to “deploy algorithms to detect and punish accounts engaged in abusive
conduct,” this effort poses a dilemma for
Twitter’s management as there is the risk of a “subscriber outflow if its new
technology ends up punishing innocent accounts.”

The
fight over fake news goes further back in time than the French presidential
election or even last year’s Brexit referendum and US general election. Two
decades ago, the physicist Alan Sokal famously hoaxed a humanities journal and exposed the rejection of objective
truth by certain disciplines in the humanities that had been caught up in
postmodern thought. Indeed, some observers have noted the irony that the spread
of leftist postmodern ideas has “produced a culture more widely receptive” to
the “irrational and anti-science views” of the resurgent far-right. Even
further back in history, the Cold War featured a battle of ideas waged by
propagandists on all sides of the conflict. However, we can trace the fight
over fake news back to classical antiquity, when Plato explained in his famous
dialogue, The Republic, why poets — whose
products are at several removes from the truth — should be banned from the
ideal city.

The
antiquity of Plato’s attack on creative falsehoods is better seen in the
context of his contemporaries in the ancient history of ideas. The historical notion
of the Axial Age identifies Plato and his successors like Aristotle as key thought
leaders in a global efflorescence dating from 800-200 BCE, when religious and
philosophical movements familiar to us today emerged and displaced older
traditions. As Armstrong (1993) explains, during the Axial Age “each region
developed a distinctive ideology … Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism
and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe … In Iran and
Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different
versions of monotheism” (p. 27).

A
more promising long-term strategy is to equip the citizenry with the cognitive
skills needed to identify and reject fake news.

In
his discussion of art and poetry in The
Republic, one major problem Plato identifies with the creative arts is that
they are removed from the truth. In his discussion of the couch, Plato explains
that the carpenter who constructs a couch imitates the perfect form of the
couch that had originally been created by the gods. A painter who produces an
image of the couch hence produces an artwork that is two removes from the true
couch. Extending this analogy to poetry, Plato argues that the poet produces an
imitation which is “two removes or so … from the truth” (596a-597e). Worse, not
only are the poet’s artworks at a double or even further distance from the
truth, for him to “gain a reputation among ordinary people,” his products must
be “designed” to excite the emotions of his audiences. Such excitement of the
emotions can “cause damage even to good people.”

This,
Plato argues, “is justification enough for our refusing to admit him into any
city, if it is to be well-governed, because by rousing, nurturing and
strengthening this element of the soul he corrupts the element of it that
reasons; it’s like handing over a city to people of inferior quality, and
putting them in charge while destroying the better sort” (605a-605c). The
relevance of this discussion for today’s struggle against fake news is that the
products of the creators of fake news are not only by their nature at an
absolute distance from the truth, they are intended to arouse emotions like
anger and outrage in their gulled audiences. If Plato is prepared to banish
poets for producing works which are partial imitations of the truth, he would
have no hesitation exiling the creators of fake news for producing stories
which are false but which deliberately bear the appearance of truth.

The
above may create the impression of Plato as an idealistic naïf. This would
however be a wrong impression. Plato’s account of how his ideal city should be
built indicates strong realist tendencies. Noting that the proper education of
children requires parents to “supervise our story-tellers, approving any story
they put together that has the required quality and rejecting any that doesn’t,”
and to “induce nurses and mothers to tell children the ones we’ve approved, and
to use stories to mould their souls,” the proper maintenance of the ideal city
requires thorough control by the rulers over the narratives that the citizens are
exposed to (377b-377c). Such permitted narratives may include falsehoods, if
these turn out to be necessary for “dealing either with enemies or citizens to
the benefit of the city as a whole; everybody else must keep strictly away from
anything of the sort” (389b-389c). Plato is even willing to permit poetry to
re-enter the city, albeit only the genre which “praises gods and virtuous men,”
thereby encouraging virtuous behavior among the citizens (Partee, 1970, p.
219).

The
current global fight against fake news echoes the ancient Platonic call for
rulers to expel the poets for creating less-than-truthful artworks. In China, for
example, the government has recognized the threat to public order posed by
“online rumors, harmful information, fake news, news extortion, fake media and
fake reporters,” and is undertaking legal reforms to further strengthen its
already-strict controls over the internet, including a proposed “qualification
system for people working in online news.”

Likewise,
the Singapore government
has recognized that the country’s laws are “ineffective to stem the circulation
of falsehoods, given how quickly they go viral today.” The government views
this as an urgent issue as there can be “falsehoods that can cause real harm,”
especially from unscrupulous agents who “use fake news to destabilise society,
or not caring if it destabilises society so long as they make money.” The government
hence is undertaking a review of the current laws to better protect the
city-state against the threat of fake news.

In Malaysia, the
government has warned the administrators of groups on social media and mobile
messaging platforms, “including WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber, Telegram, and the like,”
that they face charges under the 1998 Communications and Multimedia Act if they
fail in their responsibility to act as a “gatekeeper to filter news before
sharing,” and thereby allow fake news to be propagated.

Back
in France, the
newly-elected President Macron may follow through on his campaign pledge to
“regulate the internet” and crack down on the propagation of fake news. If the
Macron government does initiate tighter internet regulations, it will not be
alone. Elsewhere in Europe, “Germany and the UK … have explored new laws to
address social platforms and fake news.”

While
laws that penalize the deliberate propagation of fake news are one avenue to
combat the threat, a more promising long-term strategy is to equip the
citizenry with the cognitive skills needed to identify and reject fake news.
Schools in Singapore have been inculcating information
literacy in their students, with teachers showing them how to
distinguish “fact from opinion, applying logic and verifying the authority of
sources,” such that these students will eventually be able to “cross-check the
information and views presented with other sources to determine their
trustworthiness and usefulness for drawing substantiated conclusions.” The emergence
of a global population immune to fake news may be the best hope yet of finally defeating
this long-standing threat.

About The Author

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with International Public Policy Pte. Ltd. (IPP), and is the lead editor of China and Southeast Asia in the Xi Jinping Era (Lexington Books 2019) and the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Prior to joining IPP, he was a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy.